Cyberspace is one
revolution we can be confident of, since it has already happened. An
earlier chapter discussed implications for privacy. This section deals
with how to do business in a world in which physical location and
physical identity are becoming increasingly irrelevant. The issues are
connected, since tools for doing business in cyberspace may also
provide ways of maintaining control over personal information while
doing so.

We start, in
Chapter VI, with the problem of how to pay for things. One possible
answer is anonymous ecash–money that can be passed from one computer to
another by sending messages, with no need to transmit anything
physical. Such a system has the potential to provide, among other
things, a simple solution to the irritation of spam email. It also
makes some current law enforcement strategies, notably the attempt to
enforce laws by monitoring and controlling the flow of money,
unworkable. And it raises the interesting possibility of a future of
private currencies competing with each other and with government moneys
in both cyberspace and realspace.

Chapter VII
considers a different problem–enforcing contracts online. Online
interactions are, in a sense, entirely voluntary; you (or your
computer) can be tricked into doing something you do not want to but
you cannot be forced to do something you do not want to, since you are
the one with physical control over your computer. In the worst case you
can always pull the plug. In an entirely voluntary world, most legal
issues can be reduced to contract law. As enforcement of online
contracts through the court system becomes increasingly difficult it
may be in large part replaced by private alternatives based on
reputational sanctions.

We consider next
property–intellectual property. A world of easy and inexpensive copying
and communication is a world where enforcing copyright is
extraordinarily difficult. Are there other, perhaps better, ways to
give creators control over what they create? That brings us to the
recent and increasingly controversial issue of technological protection
of intellectual property–the online equivalent of the barbed wire
fences whose invention revolutionized western agriculture. It also
brings us back to the possibility of treating personal information as
private property, protected not by law but by technology.

The final chapter
of this section deals with ways in which the new technologies, by
greatly reducing the cost of communication and information, can change
how we organize our lives. One interesting and attractive possibility
is a shift away from formal organizations such as corporations and
universities towards more decentralized models, such as networks of
amateur scholars and open source programmers.